work
IL SILENZIO E’ MAFIA
| category | Installation |
| subject | Political / Social |
| tags | Political / Social, Memory / Archive, Visual Activism, Sociopolitical Art, Collective Responsibility |
| base | 248 cm |
| height | 297 cm |
| depth | 5 cm |
| year | 2020 |
Silence Is Mafia originates from a photograph taken by photojournalist Shorba in Palermo during the funeral procession of Father Pino Puglisi.
That image — a spontaneous act of civic protest — is reactivated here as an archival fragment returning to the present with renewed urgency.
Created years before the capture of the fugitive Matteo Messina Denaro, the installation places his portrait beside the historic banner “Silence is Mafia”, generating a temporal friction that exposes the continuity of criminal structures and the collective erasure that allows them to endure.
A private photograph becomes a political device, revealing the fragility of public memory and how what remains unnamed continues to operate in the shadows.
The work does not reconstruct a specific event, but what persists beyond it.
Silence becomes complicity — the distance between seeing and acknowledging.
The installation urges viewers to inhabit that distance and transform memory into responsibility.
Unique piece.
Private collection, Latin America.
That image — a spontaneous act of civic protest — is reactivated here as an archival fragment returning to the present with renewed urgency.
Created years before the capture of the fugitive Matteo Messina Denaro, the installation places his portrait beside the historic banner “Silence is Mafia”, generating a temporal friction that exposes the continuity of criminal structures and the collective erasure that allows them to endure.
A private photograph becomes a political device, revealing the fragility of public memory and how what remains unnamed continues to operate in the shadows.
The work does not reconstruct a specific event, but what persists beyond it.
Silence becomes complicity — the distance between seeing and acknowledging.
The installation urges viewers to inhabit that distance and transform memory into responsibility.
Unique piece.
Private collection, Latin America.
